


Dancing and Consequences

by Miss_M



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: ASOS Spoilers, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Crack, Dancing, Death, F/M, Season/Series 04 Spoilers, show canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-25
Updated: 2014-01-25
Packaged: 2018-01-09 23:30:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1152114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jaime asks Brienne to dance at the Purple Wedding. Jaime suffers the consequences.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dancing and Consequences

**Author's Note:**

> Strictly show canon, and almost certainly totally AU even for that. ASOS spoilers galore. I own nothing.

“Take that ridiculous thing off,” Cersei hisses. 

Even with her green eyes sunk into flesh red and puffy with weeping, dressed in a heavy gown of black brocade with a sheen lent to it by candlelight, her alabaster skin rendered pale and dry as bone by comparison, she is beautiful, his sweet sister. So beautiful, Jaime feels another in a long string of tiny, visceral stabs of desire. Desire to go to her, to offer comfort, to take her right then and there, for he has never known any other way to chase away her dark moods. 

He ignores her, goes on standing still as a statue by his king’s ( _their son’s_ ) bier, leaning his hand on the pommel of his useless Kingsguard greatsword, his armor heavy as sin and hunger, the small of his back a rigid knot of bone, and his eye a constant, throbbing ache. The vigil will go on for another three days and nights. Jaime only leaves the Royal Sept to relieve himself, put food he does not taste into his mouth and wash it down with thin, watered wine, and to change the fresh cut of meat held by leather straps over his black eye. Intended to keep the slab of cold meat in place so it would help the swelling go down, the arrangement was devised by Qyburn with an alacrity which suggested to Jaime the man was most likely a witch, able to foretell the future. Or that palace gossip scurried down the corridors even faster than Jaime remembered. 

It was his own fault. He asked the wench to dance on a lark, or so he told himself. She blushed and demurred, claiming she did not know how to dance and hadn’t attempted it since she was a young girl in her father’s hall, so of course Jaime insisted. 

“You forget I have seen you fight, my lady,” he teased. It seemed suddenly very important that she say yes. “You cannot possibly be as graceless as you claim.”

Brienne ducked her head and gave him a look heralding a distinct lack of faith in what Jaime did and did not know or believe. But she had come to him as requested earlier that day, accepted the sword Jaime’s father had presented to him, a poisoned gift honed sharp for Jaime to cut his own throat with. She had accepted a quest, on her honor and Jaime’s, like the third son of a landless knight in a song setting off to slay ogres and rescue fair maidens. So she really had little choice when Jaime asked her for this one small favor in return. 

“I do you no favor in agreeing to this, ser,” Brienne murmured, but she gave Jaime her hand and let him lead her out to the mass of gracefully twirling dancers. 

She winced even worse than he did every time one of her big feet muddled up the steps, misjudged the distance between their bodies, and she stepped on Jaime’s toes. Brienne missed her cues, so instead of leading it was all Jaime could do to try to keep up with her increasingly confused movements. They stumbled, the other dancers dodging out of their way with looks of equal parts shock and wicked amusement. Jaime caught sight of his father at the high table, an unamused idol carved of ice, Tyrion looking jollier than he had looked all evening, and Cersei staring daggers, her mouth twisted with disgust, her cheeks flushed with wine and anger at Joffrey’s choice of bride, at her own impending nuptials, at men, gods and the world. 

Brienne was blushing so warmly Jaime would have sworn he could feel the heat of her skin on his face. She attempted to twirl as she saw the other ladies doing, half a step behind the music and the other dancers, went the wrong way, and got tangled up in Jaime’s arms, her back against his chest. His golden hand lay heavy on her waist. Jaime tried to move away from her, but Brienne was faster. She panicked, tried to disengage, twisted sideways, bringing up her shield arm as though to deflect a blow, and hit Jaime in the eye with her elbow. Not as graceful as she was with sword in hand, perhaps, but her fighting instincts certainly had not deserted her, Jaime managed to think through the lancing pain, certain she had cracked his skull open like a hammer smashes a walnut. 

When the screams that the king was choking started, Jaime was doubled over in an alcove off the feasting hall, his boots feeling far too small for his swollen, flaming toes, like sausages on a spit, while Brienne loomed over him, solid as a boulder, her sharp elbows cocked out and her gentle hands fluttering at a loss after she had passed him a cloth soaked in icy water. She babbled about fresh meat being a natural cure for bruises and swellings, a Tarth folk remedy no doubt, but she fell silent when the noise from the hall reached them. 

All was confusion and a roar as though the sea had invaded the hall, a sound of horses and rivers rushing through Jaime’s ears. The king lay dead at his own wedding feast, and his mother ( _Jaime’s twin, once his lover, his everything_ ) stopped her rending sobs only to order Tyrion, of all people, arrested for the deed. Tyrion’s child bride, the pale Stark girl with whom Brienne had been so anxious to speak, was gone, vanished in the midst of the horrible mummery. Jaime made sure to pack Brienne off to look for her and keep her safe before Cersei came out of her stupor of grief and drunkenness, and cast about for someone else to blame. 

He had once told Cersei he would gladly slaughter everyone in the world till all that was left were the two of them. Now he saw that Cersei would burn down the world if she could have Joffrey back. Not him, Jaime, whether whole or maimed. Just like Aerys, crazed with sorrow and her own convictions, so fond of fire and wine yet cold and unpliable as stone. 

After Brienne had left King’s Landing, it was with a small, mean sense of satisfaction warming him from within that Jaime requested a fresh cut of meat be brought to him from the kitchens, and summoned Qyburn. And Qyburn produced the leather straps out of that bottomless font of clever invention from which he had drawn forth Jaime’s golden hand, the chainless maester’s every design poised precariously on the knife edge between cruelty and practicality. 

“My lord might wish to dispense with this during the vigil,” Qyburn advised in his soft, mock compassionate way. “The lords and ladies of the court might find it… odd for the Lord Commander of the Kingsguard to stand vigil for his king with a raw steak over his eye.” 

“Thank you for the lesson in the blindingly bloody obvious, Qyburn,” Jaime replied thinly. “The lords and ladies of the court can all go hang, so far as this Lord Commander of the Kingsguard is concerned.” The one principle he had lived by before setting off to fight the Young Wolf, to which he could still cling, for all the good it had ever done him. 

And so there he stands, armored and pristine and handless, with a slice of raw meat tied on over his swollen, purple eye. The sept twinkles with myriad candles, making Jaime’s head ache. The thick, cloying scent of incense will cling to his hair for a sennight after the vigil is finally over, and he can scrub himself clean in a warm bath. The lords and ladies who pass to pay their respects to the dead boy-king pretend not to stare at Jaime, but their snickers carry from the far corners of the sept, a sound like bats rustling in their sleep.

“Take it off!” 

Cersei’s voice is a sibilant serpent’s hiss, the furious piping of hollow reeds in a storm wind. No more. Jaime’s profile is turned to her, the meat covering his eye shields her from his view. He does not need to turn his head to know Cersei’s face will be contorted with rage, hideous. He does not move, does not acknowledge her or speak. He will never turn to her or do her bidding again, though sometimes he thinks it may well kill him to deny her. 

Unbidden, his thoughts go to Tyrion in his black cell, awaiting a fate meted out by Cersei’s heedless anger and Tywin Lannister’s cold disdain, a fate Jaime is certain his little brother does not deserve, and to Brienne, alone on the road, astride the mare Jaime found for her, armed with the sword Jaime neither deserved nor desired, Jaime’s honor and her own weighing down her saddlebags like provisions, a burden equally distributed to keep her seat secure and her horse’s gait easy. The Seven Kingdoms in the teeth of war and the oncoming Winter are no place for a woman on her own, but Brienne is no mere woman. Jaime doubts the gods ever bother about mortals, especially mortals with more ill deeds on their soul than the sky has stars and a piece of raw meat over a bruised eye, but even so he hopes the Seven will guard Brienne and his brother, and keep them both safe.


End file.
